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1.3.2-Sarah1281
Brick!Club 1.3.2 A Double Quartette It’s always nice to start a chapter by finding out we will be hearing about people who are insignificant. I wonder what ‘they are all Oscars because there are no Arthurs’ even means since none of them appear to be named Oscar. So all of these minor characters get names and Felix gets too but we never did find out what Valjean’s sister’s last name was or the names of the children. I’m just saying, I would have cared far more about that. I…don’t really understand why none of the girlfriends actually go by their real names. I mean, Zephine was the closest since it’s apparently a nickname for her presumable real name of Josephine. Dahlia at least sounds like a name but Favourite? The Blonde? But even Favourite can be used as a name since there’s no ‘the’ attached to it; it’s just dehumanizing. I feel like just her nickname indicates that Fantine is not particularly cherished. Oh, and she’s blonde which I don’t think I’ve seen outside of the terrible wig in the 10th anniversary concert. But what does having been to England have to do with being called Favourite? Well, other than the fact it’s spelled with a ‘u’ but that might just be my translation and not mean anything, I don’t know. And in addition to those nicknames there was also the old and the young and the old was twenty-three. “In their souls that flower of honesty which survives the first fall in woman”…So by being someone’s mistress they’ve fallen? Even while the guy is still around paying for them? That sounds rather tragic. I’m a little surprised that in their poverty they can still be so beautiful as to attract rich students to them. All of them but Fantine had already had romances and I feel like they should be trying to seek something a little more permanent lest their youth slip away by those standards and they end up unmarried, unsupported, and still very poor. So Favourite was illegitimate? It didn’t seem to have done her any harm in the lower class. I wonder why she put up with her supposed mother (who doesn’t appear to have offered her any proof on that score) mooching off of her all the time and bad-mouthing her. She seems too cold and practical to be moved by familial sentiment and it’s not like the mother ever did anything for her beside drop her off at her father’s. But being the daughter of a professor can’t be that low in status. How is she just working class? The illegitimacy? “She who wishes to remain virtuous must not have pity on her hands”? If you don’t want to go out and be a mistress don’t have nice hands? Is that it? You could also just say ‘no’ to any offers, these women don’t seem forced. But I find it really hard to believe that Dahlia just having awesome nails is why she was chosen as a mistress. Or maybe her guy just had a weird nail fetish. Fantine was the only one no one called ‘thou.’ I’m assuming that no one meant it in disrespect so she was the outsider, the one that nobody not even Felix was close enough with to call her that? And…she didn’t take that as a warning sign? I know she’s naïve and ignorant but this is her culture. I can’t believe some stranger on the street named her. How did that even work? Did he ask her name and find out she had none? I feel like it would have boded better for her if she had had the wherewithal to name herself instead of depending on someone else. And who goes around naming random nameless children anyway? Was that a common practice? And how did she have such nice teeth if she was so poor? It says she stayed pure as long as she was able to but that sounds like she was forced to surrender that purity and it doesn’t really seem that that was the case. So it seems more like she stayed pure until she fell in love after which she could have stayed pure but chose not to. Fantine also has the worst taste in men. I mean, seriously. What was it about Felix that drew her to him? Even just in this chapter I can’t see it. I mean, he was rich, yes, but she doesn’t seem interested in that. He is thirty while the other students were twenty. He’s really ugly. He has wrinkles at thirty and no teeth and no poverty to justify the early aging. He’s balding and has inexplicable bad knees and how did he end up this way? He has a bad eye and apparently digestion problems. At thirty not sixty. I mean, I really would have expected someone of his class to be able to take care of himself better so this is just very strange. He’s happy or at least pretending to be and hedonistic (not good for any girlfriend) and seems to take care not to believe in anything. And Fantine sees something in him, I guess. So we’re still calling them the four young men even though we’ve just finished hearing about how Felix was not young anymore? What are the parents writing to them about? They don’t appear to have finished their studies. And had the girls really pestered them for a year about a surprise? After that long they really should have given it up because it just wasn’t going to happen. It seems like that would be very annoying of them to keep bringing up all the time. But why hadn’t the guys just bit the bullet and done it already? Commentary Notnearlyadopter I think the thing about Dahlia and the hands isn’t meant as a judgment on having nice hands, per se— it’s that she was vain enough to value her pretty hands over earning a respectable living. As pilfering says, any real work she would have been hired to do would have ruined her hands, and she chose to keep her hands nice at the expense of her virtue. To me it’s one of Hugo’s funnier lines; I don’t feel particularly compelled to judge Dahlia harshly for it. It is just the Way Things Are, that Dahlia had to choose between work and mistress-ing, and the deciding factor was her pretty nails. Pilferingapples (reply to Notnearlyadopter) Reblogging for nice concise explanation about That Thing With The Hands. Also in slight astonishment that I’m just now being reminded of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, with the mother forbidding her daughter to use the lye water, because it’ll ruin her hands and she wants her to look respectable. Agh, times do not change fast enough…and lye water is wretched stuff.